Sunday, August 3, 2014

Time to Go- Fiction

The concrete monoliths that line the waterfront next to Sunset Park
fade from view at one particular angle.This stretchis significantly quieterthan the rest of the waterfront. Between two
mourning trees is a wooden bench where Suhasini and Haider come and sit,
catching glimpses of the water insilence , in a lifethat was once
a cacophony of sounds, but now serving out a sentence as final as death.

It is dusk and time to go home. Suhasini looks at her
husband, her glance shattering and piercing through the cloak of melancholy
shrouding her husband. He nods and says,”a few minutes more.” She sinks back in her corner of the bench and looks
outwards at the twinkling lights of the bridge. Massive skylights hover above the atrium,
beyond the bridge. The atriumwas built
at a huge costby theThaneConstruction Company.In addition
to its 11 acres of floor space, the complex was completed with four piers,
eachlinked by underground tunnels.
Suhasini remembers the the architect’s inaugural statement of “the great red bricked
building rise above the streets and waterfront like some vast medieval city’s
wall,” giving an impression of power and beauty.

An involuntary shudder escapes her
body and she draws her gaze away and towards the trees. She likes the two trees,
finding in their bare branches, gnarled trunk and a handful of yellow leaves
both comfort and companionship. A wrinkled yellow leaf , escaping the clutches
of thebranch to which it had been
tenuously joined, languidly brushed past Suhasini. She feels a featherlight
touch on her cheek, almost like a farewell kiss, and then the leaf floats towards the
gleaming water, settling lightly on it. The water swirls welcomingly around the
leaf, before taking it away.

To where it had taken Ritu ? She looks guiltily at Haider, only to find him
looking at her. Had he heard her thought? Haider came to her and said, “ it is
time we went”. She understood and followed him- down the waterfront, down
theeast pier, up the steps of the
atrium, down the top window, into the water, down and down…To where Ritu, their
daughter had gone when she had committed suicide, on just such an evening of
twinkling lights over the Eastern bridge.

Thank you for your comments, Anju. Hearing from you after quite some time! And thanks for the compliments. It is an old photo. I replied to your comment on my post but it simply vanished. So, here I am..:-)

About Me

I am a firm believer in Krishna's philosophy of Karma- and as a natural corollary to this belief have worked and lived so as to give grief to as few people as possible while enjoying my life , my work and myself.